Thursday, October 29, 2015

It will soon be eight years since the US Federal Reserve decided to bring its interest rate down to 0%. Other central banks have spent similar number of years (or much longer in the case of Japan) stuck at the zero lower bound. In these eight years central banks have used all their available tools to increase inflation closer to their target and boost growth with limited success. GDP growth has been weak or anemic, and there is very little hope that economies will ever go back to their pre-crisis trends.

Some of these trends have challenged the traditional view of academic economists and policy makers about how an economy works. Some of the facts that very few would have anticipated:
- The idea that central banks cannot lift inflation rates closer to their targets over such a long horizon.
- The fact that a crisis can be so persistent and that cyclical conditions can have such large permanent effects on potential output.
- The slow (or inexistent) natural tendency of the economy to adjust by itself to a new equilibrium.

To be fair, some of these facts are not a complete surprise and correspond well with the description of depressed economies that have hit the zero lower bound level of interest rates because of deflation or "lowflation". We had been warned about this by those who had studied the Japanese experience: both Krugman and Bernanke, among others, had described these dynamics for the case of Japan. But my guess is that even those who agreed with this reading of the Japanese economy would have never thought that we would see the same thing happening in other advanced economies. Most thought that this was just a unique example of incompetence among Japanese policy makers.

Now we have learned that either all central bankers are as incompetent as the Bank of Japan in the 90s or that the phenomenon is a lot more natural, and likely to be repeated, in economies with low inflation, more so when the natural real interest rates is very low.

But if this scenario is more likely to happen going forward it might be time to rethink our economic policy framework. Some obvious proposals include raising the inflation target and considering "helicopter money" as a tool for central banks. But neither of these proposals is getting a lot of traction

My own sense is that the view among academics and policy makers is not changing fast enough and some are just assuming that this would be a one-time event that will not be repeated in the future (even if we are still not out of the current event!).

The comparison with the 70s when stagflation produced a large change in the way academic and policy makers thought about their models and about the framework for monetary policy is striking. During those year a high inflation and low growth environment created a revolution among academics (moving away from the simple Phillips Curve) and policy makers (switching to anti-inflationary and independent central banks). How many more years of zero interest rate will it take to witness a similar change in our economic analysis?

Antonio Fatas

I am the Portuguese Council Chaired Professor of European Studies and Professor of Economics at INSEAD, a business school with campuses in Singapore and Fontainebleau (France), a Senior Policy Scholar at the Center for Business and Public Policy at the McDonough School of Business (Georgetown University, USA) and a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (London, UK).